Yasmin's Computer Game Arts Journey

Once I had planned out what my Battle Arena was going to look like and gotten the hand of how to model a bit better in Maya I was then able to build my battle arena!

Modelling Process

For this battle arena, even though we had to import it into Unity at the end and animate a camera around the scene, I decided to model my whole environment to scale within Maya, unlike my Game Walkthrough. I have already done a blog post on how I learned to 3D model in Maya, so look at that if you haven't already seen it, but I basically used these techniques to 3D model my environment.

I realised that I had made things hard for myself because I was trying to model everything inside a closed boat and wasn't too sure how the best way to go around this was but then I was told that the arena needed to be in an open environment so that made my life easier. Instead, I changed my design a bit to make the boat look old and rusted, as if it had sunken a while back. This also fitted with the steampunk look that I wanted to create anyway so I still stuck with my original steampunk / robotic design ideas for the windows, chest filled with nuts and bolts and other things.

I attempted to make very complex 3D models such as fish, underwater anemone and of course, the robot Josef from Machinarium. I also used ncloth to create a realistic cloth model over the table within the boat which I then combined into the table to make into a mesh.



Little did I know that these complex (and sometimes rather messy) 3D models would come to haunt me during the texturing process of this battle arena....

Texturing Process

I'm going to be honest here, at first I found texturing extremely daunting. Mainly because of the UV maps that I had created for myself during the complex 3d modelling of a lot of my objects. I had a lot of work to do, stitching them together and then using the outline image as a reference to create my own textures. I turned on the turtle option for baking and reset the settings and output file so that I could bake my UV map and use that as a visual reference to how it looks as well as exporting the UV snapshot for the outlines of the UV map. I could then open these both in Photoshop and start creating my own textures for that object. I usually did this by gathering lots of different source images, such as rock, moss and coral and overlapping them, making them tile and using the eraser at different opacity settings to blend them all together to make a completely new texture out of the combined ones. I also used the layers overlay settings to change how a layer could look when on top of others, either making it hardlit, or just using the colour from the image, etc. I found this technique extremely useful because I wanted to keep the Machinarium art style within my battle arena so a lot of the time I would look for images of the game and then copy a small section of the scene and overlap it over the whole of my image, choosing to only add the colour of it to the texture that I already had made.

This is the photoshop file for a barrel in my scene

What the UV map looks like after importing my handmade texture for my robot To apply a texture to the 3D model I simply opened up my hypershader window, created a new lambert, gave it a relevant name and in colour added a file instead and then included the image that I wanted to use. After that it's just a matter of dragging the chosen lambert and dropping it onto the model you want to texture!

How textures were before automatic unwrapping

Now it was time to create the flyby camera in Unity to whizz around my scene, but first, I still wasn't happy with the way it looked. It still didn't look like it was underwater to me so I added a water ripple asset from Unity Standard Assets to sit on top of the rocks so that the camera to fly down through the water, emphasising that this was a sunken ship, as well as some lights around the scene to make it look more blue. I added a light above the water ripples which was a light blue colour which shone down on the scene and some blue and green lights dotted around the battle arena. This now made it look a lot more scenic and gave it the Rapture feel from Bioshock that I originally wanted to include from my moodboard.

A huge part of Computer Game Arts is 3D modelling through 3D computer graphics software. The majority of games nowadays have moved on from the art style of 2D pixels on a screen, with technology being far more advanced and enabling players to experience more realistic and true-to-life gameplay visuals. This is done through 3D modelling and these models aren't only used for games but can also be a means of creating 3D animation and special effects in films! So, with all of this in mind, I am very excited and determined to not only understand how to create these models but to put in a lot of effort to do it well so that I can have fun using it and be able to experiment with how my models can be used. (I've even noticed that 3D environments can be used to produce 360 YouTube videos, but more on that in the future...)

As I am creating both a Battle Arena and a Walkthrough Game simultaneously for this course I needed to create 3D models for both of them. The software that I'm learning is Maya, a well known 3D computer graphics software which is widely used to create interactive 3D applications ranging from games to animations and visual effects.

When I first started using Maya it took me a while to understand and remember the keyboard shortcuts and overall techniques on how to build object from blocks, extruding and manipulating wire meshes. It's entirely different from drawing in 2D art and because of this I found it difficult to start from a blank scene and create what I wanted from my mind.

So instead I started with a tutorial! I built this cartoon house from a series of YouTube videos that I had found and got to witness first hand the commentators thought processes as he was creating the house which helped me to understand how to go about customising the shapes and using the different tools as well as some very useful time saving tips such as using the outliner tool to group everything together instead of having to combine meshes all of the time just in case I still wanted them to stay separate to add changes, but was then still able to move things around as a group instead of individually. This also taught me to think ahead when creating my models to think about texturing and what will happen if I need to import it into Unity3D. For example, in the house above the door has a separate panel to add some depth to the texturing and I had to make the door separate from the house if I wanted to import it and animate to open and close for gameplay in Unity.

Once I had created this house I found it a lot easier to begin modelling the rest of my environment assets (the environment below is for my walkthrough game). I could reuse shapes I had created before and simply modify them to suit another asset that I needed instead of having to start from a basic object every time which saved a lot of time. Below I have made a gate, fence, cobbled path, well and a speaker in half the time that it took me to create the house (which was a day) just by reusing parts of it.


Josef from Machinarium - Character modelling
I wanted to give myself a challenge after having grasped the very basics of modelling and tasked myself with creating a 3D model of the robot protagonist Josef from the point-and-click game, Machinarium. (It's a cute and overall awesome game for those of you that haven't played it, and if you haven't, go do so, NOW!  :) )

I started from his tube body, changing the width divisions lower than 20 to make him look a little less smooth and more clunky to keep with the old steampunk art style and created the shape of the protruding pipes by extracting different layers out and repositioning them to make them thinner or wider, then redoing that over and over and over, the whole time being careful to try and create the curves that I wanted when I reached his head. I then used the multi-component select tools to select either points or lines of the mesh and move them around individually, or created more points and lines by using the multi-cut or insert edge-loop tools. For the eyes, arms and legs I created them separately using the same extruding method and then placed them where I wanted on Josef's body and merged the mesh together to create one overall object.

I'm really happy with what I was able to create and think he looks pretty spot on, a little chubbier, but a little podge is cute!

I became inspired by the first YouTube videos that I watched on learning how to create the cartoon house and how much it helped me to just see someone's thought processes when learning Maya and so have uploaded my own video on creating a ladder to YouTube. It's a simple object to create but through watching the video you can much easier see my techniques and understanding of the different tools within Maya to create the object as well as when things go wrong and how I go about fixing them, it's much easier to watch me create something that read about me babbling on about my learning processes through Maya (although you already have done so THANK YOU!) so if you need more information of how I have learnt to 3D model and how I create my models then have a watch :)

Using my moodboard as a reference I scamped out my game arena to visualise it before I start the 3D model process. I decided that I definitely wanted to make my arena underwater because I know that later on I will be animating elements of it and adding a statue; having the arena underwater offers lots of potential for animation by adding fish, bubbles and seaweed in the sea, swaying to the motion of the waves. I also still really like the idea of mixing the eerie elements of Bioshock with the simple and endearing cartoon-like design of Machinarium and feel that having the arena underwater will stay true to Rapture as I can play around with the exaggerated shadows like they did. Making a mechanical ship was more influenced by Machinarium as the game includes a world dull of robots and, because I wanted to copy that style of design, I wanted to make a robot-like sunken boat!

The boat will include objects such as a treasure chest of nuts and bolts, a bar area, barrels and oil containers, pipes and even a secret hatch leading the player to the sea surrounding the boat if I get enough time. I love easter eggs in games as they are a reward to players who spend time exploring and really getting the most out of games so I think it would be awesome if I could include one in my game arena (being the secret hatch).

When I include my statue in my game I'd like it to be sunken within the sea just outside of the game arena and in view through glass windows. The statue will look like it has been sunken for a while, with moss on parts and perhaps a little broken too.